The modern bedroom had no slippers. She trotted down the stairs to its old-time equivalent, and saw the down-at-heels pair she remembered on the floral carpet beneath the bed. In the armoire was a pair of more ornate Moroccan foot coverings, which she thought might go well with the dressing gown Gilbert had been found in. She touched neither pair, but went back up to Al, who was still in Gilbert’s chair, reading the reports of Gilbert’s death.
“There are two pairs in the bedroom downstairs. I’ll take them to the lab for prints. I should have caught that.”
“I have the advantage of looking at the scene with ninety-nine percent of the work already done,” he said, dismissing her self-criticism. “What about prints in here?”
“Mostly Gilbert’s, the others belong to the lawyer Rutland and some of the dinner group. Gilbert had them up here after the party in early January—the housecleaner wiped down all the woodwork once a month, and she’d done it the previous Thursday.”
“Any sign of disturbance from carrying him down the stairs? If he’d been wearing shoes, he might have scraped the wallpaper, but he wasn’t. You know, I wouldn’t think it easy to sling a dead weight of, what, one hundred sixty pounds across your shoulders and walk down two flights of stairs, but there were no signs of dragging, either here or on the body.”
“Which means we’re most likely looking at a strong, fit male. Probably a man,” she corrected, remembering Jeannine Cartfield’s build and grip. “I could do a fireman’s carry of one hundred sixty pounds if I had to, but not for long and definitely not down those stairs.”
“And there’s no blood here except for the chair back.”
“The fibers the ME found in the head wound might turn out to match Gilbert’s bath towels,” Kate mused.
“That would support an unpremeditated bashing. If so, the perp might have found sheets to wrap the body in so it didn’t pick up fibers from his car, but what about the wheelbarrow?”
“If he used one—those prints in the emplacement were not exactly definitive.”
Hawkin didn’t answer, since there wasn’t much to say on the matter. He flipped through a few pages. “What about the fragments of statue?”
“What about them?”
“You’d expect to find signs of them along the trajectory of the blow, but it looks like most of the pieces were between the chair and the door.”
“Except for the one behind the filing cabinet; the pieces were teeny, like sawdust. He could have transferred them to the carpet from his shoe, after cleaning up.”
“Any signs of cleaning up? In the broom or dustpan, the vacuum, the mop?”
He knew there were not. “He used rags or paper towels, like I do when I drop a glass on the kitchen floor.”
“And took the rags with him?”
“Since they’re not in the garbage can.”
Hawkin scowled at the crime-scene sketch, folded his reading glasses away into his pocket, and said, “Let’s go back to where he was found.”
THURSDAY traffic across the bridge was not as heavy as it had been the previous Saturday, and they drove underneath the northbound freeway and wound their way into the park. Kate turned in the direction of the one-way tunnel, no more keen on launching a car down the precipitous cliffside as a driver than she had been as a passenger. The signal light at the tunnel’s entrance showed red; they waited for the green, Kate thinking of the story’s narrator and his dashboard-denting trip through this same tunnel. The thing might be fiction, but the writer’s terror had been heartfelt.
Cars emerged from the tunnel’s end, and a couple minutes later, the light went green. This route wound among the park housing, artists’ studios, information center, and other buildings without signs; Kate’s thoughts again wandered to the story at the center of this case, and she shook her head ruefully.
“What’s wrong?” Al asked.
“Oh, I just keep catching myself thinking about that story as if it was an actual case. I was looking at those buildings and wondering which one Jack Raynor and his killer lived in.”
“Yes, I know what you mean.”
They kept to the left at the Y, passing the Nike missile site, then circled around the conference center and the path leading to the lighthouse, finally pulling in across from the entrance to the DuMaurier battery, at the top of the hill they had been required to hike up the week before.
The entrance to the gun emplacement was still roped off with yellow police tape, but from its sagging appearance and the fresh footprints within, more than one visitor had ignored its message and pulled it up to pass beneath. Fortunately, the padlock had been replaced on the door to the room where Gilbert had been found; Kate paused at the entrance to the open-ended concrete tunnel and shone her flashlight at the ground.
“They found the tread marks along here, but after a week there was no telling if they came from a wheelbarrow or a bicycle. It could even have been a jogging stroller—God knows there’s plenty of those in Marin.”
Hawkin walked to the other end of the tunnel, to the amphitheater-like circle where the gun itself had once stood. The hillside spilled down toward the sea; two men strolled along the cliff top going north, while a woman with one child on her back and a toddler in a stroller—a thick-wheeled jogging stroller—passed them headed south. The wind was unrelenting; off to the right, two bright kites strained hard against their strings.
Kate tucked her hands under her arms, wishing she’d brought a warm hat. After a while, Hawkin had absorbed everything the view had to tell him, and retreated down the tunnel. Kate followed, digging the padlock key from her pocket. The hasp sprang open with the ease of unweathered metal; the two detectives drew out their flashlights and stepped inside.
The smell of death was nearly gone, faded beneath the musk of damp. The floor had been vacuumed for evidence by the crime-scene team, but the old concrete walls were untouched, spalled and peeling. Kate’s beam caught on a drop of water, trembling on the tip of one of the nascent stalactites.
“He came at night,” Hawkin said. His voice echoed back at them from the hard surfaces.
“Most likely,” Kate agreed. Nobody would risk unloading a body in pajamas in broad daylight. Fog might have made a reasonable substitute for dark, but if Gilbert had died as they thought, on or around the twenty-third of January, the fog had not cooperated. Rain, yes, but the risk would have been considerable.
“What are the travel restrictions in the park at night?”
“There aren’t any restrictions,” Kate said, with a brush of memory from the idea of midnight skateboarders.
“So he could have driven up to the battery’s front door, carried the body in, dumped him, been away again in, what, five minutes?”
“Longer if the lock was still attached. He would’ve had to come here, break the lock open, go back for Gilbert, either carry or wheel him inside, then pull the lock shut again.”
“Let me have your car keys,” Hawkin said, and they went back to the entrance. She watched him walk to the car, open the trunk, then walk to the driver’s door and get in. When the door opened again, she noted the time on her watch. He walked briskly up the hill, ducking under the yellow tape and past Kate into the tunnel. At the door, he paused to work his flashlight back and forth as if using a pry bar, and after a reasonable expanse of time, pushed the door open.
He half-trotted back out the tunnel and through the trees to the car. Its trunk went up; Hawkin disappeared behind the raised trunk lid; the car bounced around a few times; and after a minute he reappeared, staggering out from behind the car with its spare tire balanced precariously across his back. Bent double beneath the awkward object, he plodded slowly up the hill.
Kate watched, suddenly apprehensive: A man who’d had a heart scare probably shouldn’t be hauling spare tires around. However, when he went past her he was not breathing with any particular difficulty, and when he came out into the tunnel again sans tire, he appeared neither winded nor in any discomfort. He pulled the door shu
t, hung the lock back in place and pretended to thumb the screws back into the wood, then trotted back to the car and jumped behind the wheel. Kate marked the time and walked down to join him.
“Just short of five and a half minutes,” she told him.
He got out of the car with a thermos in his hand, and led her over to the picnic table where the Coroner’s men had gathered that first day. The two detectives sat on the table part with their feet on the bench and their backs to the battery, looking across the hills that were the Golden Gate and the rich orange bridge that spanned it. Al unscrewed the thermos, poured the coffee into its two cups, and set the larger one next to Kate while he rummaged in his pocket for a packet of sweetener. A large bird rode the wind, tipping and turning to maintain itself over a spot on the ground far below.
Al leaned forward and cupped his hands around the steaming cup, blowing gently across its top. “Would you have noticed that the soil here is different from the rest of the headlands?”
“No. Maybe if I’d first seen the two sides from a boat.”
“When I was here on Tuesday, Dan Culpepper thought I should be educated about the headlands. So in between interviewing the residents, he lectured me on the history of the lighthouse, the difference between cannon and mortar, and the nature of Nike missiles. And he covered the ground. Two plates meet just offshore, the North American and the Pacific. The San Andreas Fault defines the coast. And right here? We’re sitting on top of a volcano.”
Kate studied him out of the corner of her eye. “You’re not talking about the investigation, are you?”
“Actually, no metaphor intended. I just thought it was interesting, that the reason the ground is different—green basalt, for your information, unlike the rocky sandstone you see on the opposite hill—is that over here is the remnant of a long-extinct underwater volcano.”
All Kate could think of to say was, “Well, I guess we know something Sherlock Holmes didn’t.”
“Thank God for that. So: five and a half minutes, start to finish, assuming the perp knew exactly what to expect here.”
“I agree. He’d have had to know the layout of the gun itself, and that there was just a simple padlock on this door. The padlock anyone could see, but surely there aren’t that many people who know what’s behind the door?”
“You’d say we’re looking at someone from the headlands?”
“Or someone who’s taken a tour of these installations.”
“No, that’s no good. It has to have been someone who knew the story itself. Unless Gilbert gave it to someone here, it’s more likely that the perp assumed the story’s description of the site was accurate. That once he’d pulled off the padlock, he’d find a room behind it that more or less corresponded with the given details.”
Except that the body in the story was a young officer, not a middle-aged man in a silk dressing gown. Kate shook her head to dislodge the persistent, fictional Jack Raynor, then turned the gesture into a denial that fit their discussion.
“I’d say he at least came here and saw the outside of the emplacement. People don’t tend to carry pry bars around in their cars.”
“Unless you’re a builder,” Hawkin noted, but before Kate could recall if they had any carpenters in their pool of suspects, he went on. “Was the killer planning every step, do you suppose? Or making do as he went?”
“A bash on the head causing death by heart attack isn’t exactly premeditated murder.”
“I agree, the death itself may have been accidental, or at least premature. But the disposing of the body was thought out.”
“But why here?” Kate asked, making her contribution to the reasoning.
“Lieutenant Jack Raynor.” Al’s eyes were following the bird that sailed far above their heads, but Kate thought his mind was focused elsewhere.
“Which brings us back to the story,” she said.
“I wonder why the author didn’t put his name on it? Or her name. Seems to me that would be an automatic thing for a writer.”
“Unless the writer was pretending to be someone else. Like Arthur Conan Doyle. Or unless it had a title page that got lost.”
“If so, it wasn’t numbered. The thing starts on page one.”
“You think it might be a forgery after all? Elaborate, but everyone seems to agree that the stakes are pretty high.”
“Is that a hawk or a turkey buzzard?” he asked suddenly.
Kate craned to look at the dark outline. “I don’t know. Can you see if the tail is brown?”
“Too far away.”
“Then it could be either. Does it matter?”
“No. Although it might have contributed to the decision to put the body inside the battery. If Gilbert was killed by a friend, that is, someone who didn’t care for the idea of wildlife treating Philip Gilbert as dinner. It would also explain why, although he couldn’t do much to rearrange the body, what with rigor, the clothing had been tidied around it.”
“But we know he was put here by someone who knew him. I refuse to believe that bringing him to this gun emplacement was accidental.”
“Of course not, but I mean someone with an emotional attachment to Gilbert. Something that went beyond their mutual interest in Arthur Conan Doyle.”
She thought about that for a minute, then said, “We assumed he was in his dressing gown because he was getting ready for bed, but he could have been getting up. Either in the morning, or after a, what, romantic interlude?”
“Sex,” Al said bluntly. “What did the autopsy say?”
“Swab was negative, but if he wasn’t penetrated, and if he’d had a shower afterwards, it would be hard to tell. There was nothing on the sheets.”
“On his sheets, no.”
“You think he could have been killed elsewhere?”
“The urge to get a body out of one’s house is considerable. If he’d died at home, the killer might have been more tempted just to arrange the body at the foot of the stairs or something and sneak away.”
“But we found Gilbert’s blood on the back of the chair, and the statue is broken and missing.”
“The placement of the blood doesn’t make me happy.”
“What do you mean? The vic was plenty tall enough to clear the top of that chair.”
“But if somebody hits you hard enough on the right side of the head to knock you out, will your torso remain sitting upright in your chair? And will your head lean neatly back against the rest, in the direction the blow came from, and bleed gently into the leather?”
Kate’s eyes narrowed as she visualized the room, the chair, the television set, the stain. “You would if your basher grabbed you and dragged you back.”
Hawkin nodded, but said, “That would take some doing, to swing the statue and step forward in time to catch your vic before he fell out of the chair. Plus, there was no trace of blood on the carpet from a dropped statue.”
Kate squinted in thought. “What if he used the statue to bash Gilbert, but it didn’t break? And then he saw that Gilbert was falling, so he stepped forward and let go of it.”
“It would have hit the carpet.”
“Or he could have sort of tossed it behind him. It would break against the floor in back of the chair, explaining the piece we found and the tiny shards in the carpet.”
“Yes,” he said dubiously.
“So, would you rather have two doers here, one to whack and one to catch?”
“That doesn’t feel right, either. It’s nothing,” he said and stood up from the bench, shaking out the dregs from his cup. “I just like to be able to feel how a thing happened, and I can’t here.”
Kate drained her own cup and dropped it onto the thermos. “So, what next?”
“No motive, no suspects. We need to reconstruct his last days.”
“Bank statements and credit card records should be in any time.”
“Those’ll be a good place to start,” he agreed. “You make an appointment with Jeannine Cartfield?”
?
??I threatened to arrive with uniforms and take her away in a black and white if she didn’t set up a time. I’m going to see her tomorrow afternoon.”
“While you’re doing that, maybe I’ll take a swing at the neighbors. You had a couple twinges there, didn’t you?”
“The helpful guy across the street and the night nurse who lives next door,” Kate recalled.
“I’ll see what I can get out of them.”
“When we finish, that’s pretty much the entire run of contacts and records, and as far as I can see we’ve got nothing. Until Crime Scene coughs up a report, what else do you want to do?”
Far too early to consider the case cold. Still, it was one of those times Kate was grateful that at least the victim didn’t have a family to answer to.
“You’ve got something this weekend, don’t you?”
“Just a trip to Point Reyes.”
“The whole weekend in Point Reyes, according to Lee. She made it very clear that I was not to expect you to show up for anything short of a hostage situation, with me as hostage.”
Kate gave him a wry grin. “She’s even rescheduled her Saturday client so we can have all day there. But honest, it’s just Point Reyes, I can get away for part of the time.”
“Well, let’s see what we come up with tomorrow. It might be helpful to take just an hour or two and go over the high points, set things up for Monday.”
“Say the word. I won’t even tell Lee it’s your fault.”
“My vulnerable organs thank you,” he said.
They climbed off the table and went to lock up, but instead of turning to the room, Hawkin continued on to the far end where the tunnel opened up for the gun, long gone from where they were. He stood, looking out over the gray-green Pacific, then shifted to study the ridge at the top of the cliffs.
A trail ran the cliff top between DuMaurier and Battery Mendel to the north, but to the south the ground was rough and overgrown. Hawkin set off in that direction, picking his way in inadequate shoes, with Kate behind him. A tongue of rock (gray, Kate noted) protruded into the ocean, creating a miniature bay far below, with refrigerator-sized rocks in the place of a beach. The swell of waves beat and retreated, beat and retreated, the white foam broken here and there by the heads of jagged black boulders.